6 Comments
Published by OneSwitch.org.uk
on Wednesday, September 25, 2013 at 4:35 AM.

17 September 2013, this fantastic news cribbed direct from the GDAA site: Australia is leading the world in making games accessibility a priority. The latest demonstration of commitment to enabling a wider cross section of the community be catered for when playing games is the inaugural Accessibility Award announced by the Game Developers’ Association of Australia (GDAA) as part of the 2013 Australian Game Developer Awards. This follows on from the inclusion of accessibility considerations by Film Victoria and Screen Australia when allocating funding to game development projects.

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Published by OneSwitch.org.uk
on Sunday, May 19, 2013 at 5:39 PM.

My Carnival hopes to become a video game for children with Cystic Fibrosis. If it reaches it's funding total, it will be released free of charge on PC. It's a laudable project, by the proven and brilliant AccessAble Games, but it needs support or it won't happen this way. 12 days to go at the time of writing...

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Published by OneSwitch.org.uk
on Sunday, March 17, 2013 at 4:59 AM.

Fancy an eye-gaze unit that is the price of an Xbox or PC Kinect and $60? Sounds good doesn't it? The NUIA eyeCharm from 4tiitoo.com is looking to be just that.

The device will come with developer tools including a scripting language to set-up controls that will interface with other main-stream eye tracker units. There's three weeks to go to help them reach their goal of $100,000.

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Published by OneSwitch.org.uk
on Tuesday, February 26, 2013 at 5:29 AM.

Global Game Jam is an annual game hack weekend, where teams around the world are given a common theme to work to (this year's was 'heart beat'), and divide into teams to produce an entire end to end functioning game by the end of the 48 hours. Read on...

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Published by OneSwitch.org.uk
on Friday, February 22, 2013 at 4:39 PM.

Sad news to hear that game accessibility advocate and pioneer Kenji Eno died this week at the age of 42. Kenji produced the first ever audio game to make its way onto a games console, RealSound: Kaze No Regret (aka The Regret of the Wind). Here's a brief excerpt from a 2008 interview with 1UP.com:

1UP: Yeah, not only was it funky, it was also a game without any visuals. What inspired it, and how did you get Sega to publish it?

KE: After I released D, people were always expecting more CG graphics from me, and I got tired of that. I didn't want people to think that they could predict what Warp would do next. Also, I had a chance to visit people who are visually disabled, and I learned that there are blind people who play action games. Of course, they're not able to have the full experience, and they're kind of trying to force themselves to be able to play, but they're making the effort. So I thought that if you turn off the monitor, both of you are just hearing the game. So after you finish the game, you can have an equal conversation about it with a blind person. That's an inspiration behind this game as well.

So Sega was asking for exclusive rights to the game, and I said, "OK, if you'll donate a thousand Saturns to blind people, then I'll donate a thousand games along with the Saturns." And my condition was that if Sega would go for this idea, I would make that game Sega exclusive. So, that's how this happened. It's been several years now, and of course the contract probably isn't valid anymore, but the reason that I haven't done anything with this game is that I made this promise with Sega back in the day, and it's exclusive because of those conditions.

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Published by OneSwitch.org.uk
on Sunday, January 27, 2013 at 5:18 PM.

The symbol above is a public domain method of marking any computer product (game, controller, utility, console and so on), as having easy to reach accessibility information.

This can support potential end-users of a gaming product decide if it might suit their own personal abilities. It will hopefully also support developers to better promote the accessibility of their own gaming ware.

A simple example of this would be for an indie game developer to include the symbol on their game's home-page, alongside a short hyper-link pointing to a game review that includes a break down of game accessibility.